six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2023-09-01

Beeg Hololive-EN Replica Update

Never thought I'd actually build this, but here it is: Sana's tower in all its glory (as far as I could piece it together, that is). Also added the nether ice road to the sakura village Kiara found, Ame's Nuko statue, Pekora's o-bake and a couple other structures.

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Posted 00:43 [permalink]

2023-07-01

Hololive-EN Minecraft Replica Summer 2023 Update

The new version fixes a number of mistakes and inaccurracies, the largest of which was with Ame's house. It's been bothering me for a while now that the trees on the house in my replica were quite different from the ones in the original (because at the time I didn't know how to encourage trees to grow in particular shapes). And when I discovered that I also had placed the house 5 blocks too far north, I decided to tear it all down and rebuild it from scratch.

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Posted 12:40 [permalink]

2022-12-13

Hololive-EN Minecraft Replica Christmas Update

Time for another update of my little Hololive-EN Minecraft world replica. This time I traced some of Kiara's adventures, expanded Spawn Plaza, expanded Ina's and Fauna's basements, and added a couple more farms and member houses. There could be easter eggs too.

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Posted 18:04 [permalink]

2022-08-24

A Walk in the Hololive-EN Park

Smol update to my Hololive-EN Minecraft world replica. This time I added the HQ park made by Ollie and Ame, the end portal, Pekora's house and the skyway to Phoenixton. Some other structures too.

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Posted 20:18 [permalink]

2022-07-12

Hololive-EN Minecraft World Replica Next

For this update I traced Ame and Gura's journey to the coral island and added the structures they built on that trip. The dinky spawnhouse got replaced with the fancy new spawn area station. I also added a couple more farms, Ina's shooting range, Fauna's and Mumei's houses, the isekai well, and the Hyperloop. Bunkeronii received some updates too (new entrance, enchantment room, new farm rooms).

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Posted 23:01 [permalink]

2022-05-08

Hololive-EN Minecraft World Replica Update

The new version of my little replica of the Hololive-EN Minecraft server fixes some inaccuracies that were in the first version and expands several mines in the tunnel that had been only stubs before (Kiara Shaft, Mines of Mori, Big Mine, Creeper Shaft, Deep Lava Mine, Long Mine, ...). I also added more structures, including ... well, see for yourself:

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Posted 10:00 [permalink]

2021-12-01

Explore the Hololive-EN Minecraft World?

If you like Minecraft and Hololive-EN you've probably wanted to explore their server on your own at some point. However, for us mere mortals that just isn't going to happen. Not with the original server, that is. But what about a replica of their world?

Minecraft has a feature that allows spawning worlds from seeds, and using the same seed with the same Minecraft version basically produces the same world. After installing Minecraft Java Edition v1.16.3 (their starting version) and launching a new world from the Hololive-EN seed (you can find it by searching the web for "hololive minecraft seed") I got indeed spawned in the starting area indicated in this fan-made map. Walking north and east got me to the HQ area. Without any of their buildings, of course. So I went ahead and fixed that.

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Posted 23:00 [permalink]

2020-06-03

Disable Firefox 77 Address Bar Popout

*sigh* Another day, another Firefox fuckup. One of the more annoying new "features" in recent Firefox versions is the address bar jumping at you when it gets the focus. In Firefox 75 that misbehavior could be corrected with a couple adjustments in about:config:

browser.urlbar.openViewOnFocus false
browser.urlbar.update1 false
browser.urlbar.update1.interventions false
browser.urlbar.update1.searchTips false

However, with Firefox 77 those settings don't work anymore (you can reset/delete them). Because who would ever want to disable what Mozilla developers in their infinite wisdom decided that you must like?

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Posted 12:42 [permalink]

2020-05-23

Barracuda Backup Reports Missing Drive

Barracuda Backup reports show a warning when the Windows agent cannot find a drive that is supposed to be backed up:

A Volume (drive) that was previously backed up is no longer there and being backed up.: Removing volume X: because it no longer exists.

The vendor documentation has an article that describes how to bring the missing drive back online. But what if the drive was removed on purpose and people just forgot to adjust the backup configuration first? You can't simply change the backup configuration to ignore the drive after the fact, since the drive is already absent and thus cannot be de-selected.

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Posted 11:05 [permalink]

2017-04-01

Reset VSS Writers

VSS writers are application-specific components for Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service, which ensure the consistency of application data when a shadow copy is created. That's quite useful for creating consistent backups of a system. However, some of these writers go into error states more or less frequently. And Microsoft did not deem it necessary to document how to reset writers without rebooting the entire system (or at least I didn't manage to find that piece of information).

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Posted 16:19 [permalink]

2017-03-21

Verifying checksums on Windows systems - correctly

Posted here, since the Fedora people apparently can't be bothered to fix their documentation.

In January 2016 I came across this question on StackOverflow, asking about an OutOfMemory error when validating the SHA256 checksum of a Fedora ISO image. The Fedora documentation suggested reading the full file and then calculating the checksum from the bytes:

$sha256.ComputeHash([System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes("$PWD\$image"))

Why anyone would even want to read an entire ISO image into memory for a checksum calculation is beyond me. The recommended way of doing this is to open the file as a stream and calculate the checksum on that stream:

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Posted 00:24 [permalink]

2016-01-04

Cannot delete my own scheduled task

Recently I noticed that I was no longer able to delete scheduled tasks on my Windows 7 test box, even though I created them myself. Deletion attempts failed with the following error:

The user account does not have permission to delete this task.

Deleting my own tasks works fine in a vanilla install of Windows 7 SP1, so the issue must have been introduced by some update along the way. I had to modify the permissions on C:\Windows\System32\Tasks to get it to work again:

icacls "C:\Windows\System32\Tasks" /grant "Authenticated Users":(RD)

Granting "list folder/read data" on the folder itself was sufficient, since the task files are owned by the user creating them and the CREATOR OWNER principal has full access to subfolders and files.

Posted 19:51 [permalink]

2015-12-31

Barracuda Backup Agent for Linux Unattended Installation

Barracuda Networks provide agents for their backup appliance for various operating systems. Unfortunately the Linux agent (unlike the Windows agent) does not come with an option for a silent installation, and it doesn't look like the vendor can be bothered to do anything about it.

Instead of being able specify a path on the commandline (or at least force a silent installaton to the default path) you're always prompted for the path where the agent should be installed:

/tmp # tar xzf barracuda_backup_agent-x.x.x.tar.gz
/tmp # cd barracuda_backup_agent-x.x.x
/tmp/barracuda_backup_agent-x.x.x # ./install
Please choose an installation path, or press enter for default.
[/usr/local/barracuda/bbs]: _

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Posted 01:13 [permalink]

2015-06-07

Using the DB2 Command Line Processer from PowerShell

Even for DB2 10.5 the official documentation says to use the db2cmd command for a Command Line Processor enabled environment on Windows:

On Windows operating systems, db2cmd command opens the CLP-enabled DB2® window, and initializes the DB2 command line environment.

However, being able to use PowerShell instead of db2cmd would be much nicer, since the former is far more versatile in practically every respect (control structures, output processing, file handling, etc.).

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Posted 01:38 [permalink]

2015-03-09

Drag & Drop in a PowerShell GUI

For a little PowerShell GUI (using Windows Forms) the requirement to drag & drop files into a listbox came up. Some quick googling showed several articles (like this one) suggesting to set AllowDrop = $true and add a handler for the DragEnter event.

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Posted 19:18 [permalink]

2015-01-18

Adding Group Members Across Domains

Normally when you add a member to an Active Directory group you'll simply use the Add-GroupMember cmdlet from the ActiveDirectory module. Except when you have to do it across domains/forests where the source domain is still running Windows Server 2008 (not R2). As in "no AD PowerShell cmdlets" and "no Active Directory Web Service (ADWS)". *sigh*

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Posted 18:25 [permalink]

2015-01-05

PowerShell Execution Policy Scopes

Sometimes when you try to change the PowerShell execution policy you'll get an error message that the setting was applied, but will be overridden by a setting in another scope:

Set-ExecutionPolicy : Windows PowerShell updated your execution policy successfully, but the setting is overridden by a policy defined at a more specific scope. Due to the override, your shell will retain its current effective execution policy of XXX. …

Execution policies can be defined in five different scopes, from LocalMachine (least specific) to MachinePolicy (most specific), where settings in more specific scopes take precedence over settings in less specific scopes. Use Get-ExecutionPolicy -List to see which scope has which setting.

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Posted 22:46 [permalink]

2014-07-11

Force Extensions into SeaMonkey

SeaMonkey is my preferred web browser, because I'm quite comfortable with its user interface. However, some of my favorite extensions (namely text/plain and ReloadEvery) claim to be incompatible when trying to install them, although they actually work just fine with SeaMonkey. Here's how you can convince an extension that SeaMonkey is totally fine for installation.

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Posted 19:58 [permalink]

Compare ACLs

Recently I had the need to compare the ACLs of two Active Directory objects. With file ACLs I could expand their Access properties and compare the resulting lists with Compare-Object. However, for ACLs of Active Directory objects that didn't work, so I came up with the following function.

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Posted 18:50 [permalink]

2014-06-04

Domain Password Change in Remote Desktop Sessions

At work we're connecting to customer systems through a jump station. This creates the problem that for domain password changes on the customer systems I can't open the Windows Security dialog/screen via either Ctrl+Alt+Del (shows the one on the local computer) or Ctrl+Alt+End (shows the one on the jump station).

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Posted 23:14 [permalink]